In this edition of our Employee Spotlight series, we’re proud to feature Katerina Pardali, who leads Translational Medicine team at Citryll.
This Q&A marks the Hidradenitis Suppurativa Awareness Week, a timely opportunity for Katerina to share key perspectives on the current treatment landscape—what’s missing, and how Citryll is working to fill those gaps. Katerina offers insights into her role, the daily work of her team, and how they bridge the gap between groundbreaking research and clinical application.
1. What inspired you to join Citryll?
I was drawn to Citryll’s development of a novel first-in-class therapeutic targeting NETs, a mechanism long believed to play a key role in autoimmune disease. What really stood out to me was the team’s pragmatic, data-driven approach with decisions guided by science, which strongly aligns with my own values. It’s incredibly rewarding to work on an overlooked disease like Hidradenitis suppurativa alongside such a collaborative and purpose-driven team. The shared commitment to advancing CIT-013 makes Citryll a fantastic place to work and thrive.
2. As Head of Translational Medicine, what does your day-to-day look like?
The work we do as the Translational Medicine team is driven by the mission to bridge the gap between Citryll’s scientific discoveries and deliverable patient outcomes. My days involve designing and interpreting experiments with our scientists, developing biomarker strategies, and ensuring our clinical trials generate meaningful translational insights.
I often describe the role of Translational Medicine’ as being like a spider at the center of its web, strategically positioned to sense, connect and coordinate all the threads. I work closely with the research, clinical, and bioanalytical teams, to ensure seamless integration across disciplines, translating insights into action.
What keeps me motivated is the tangible impact our work can have. We’re not just generating data, we’re shaping the path toward better treatments, strengthening our translational strategy with both scientific rigor and commercial relevance.
3. This Hidradenitis Suppurativa Awareness Week, what would you like people to understand about the science behind this condition?
Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a chronic, painful inflammatory skin disease with a complex underlying biology. It involves immune dysregulation, leading to an overactive inflammatory response. Neutrophils infiltrate the skin and release web-like structures known as neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) which, in excess, can damage tissue and drive ongoing inflammation. Growing evidence highlights NETs as a central driver of HS, and Citryll’s lead program, CIT-013, is designed to target this mechanism.
HS is far more than a skin condition; it is a systemic inflammatory disease which impacts the whole body. It has a huge burden on patients, causing painful nodules, abscesses, and scarring, often with distressing discharge. Nearly all patients (about 97%) report pain, and many experience depression and anxiety. Around 60% say the disease severely impacts their quality of life. Despite this burden, treatment options have historically been limited, and many patients continue to struggle with inadequate disease control.
4. Where are the current gaps in the treatment of HS?
HS remains difficult to manage due to delayed diagnosis, lack of curative options, limited treatment efficacy, and incomplete understanding of its underlying mechanisms.
Patients often face long delays in diagnosis, by which time disease severity and scarring have worsened. Even after diagnosis, there is no curative treatment for HS. Therapy is “universally challenging”, and patients often live with chronic, recurrent abscesses and draining wounds, with cycle of flares and remissions that can last decades.
Another major gap is the limited efficacy of current therapies and the gaps in our understanding of the disease. Some approved treatments offer relief for some patients, but many do not respond fully or lose response over time. Additionally, there are gaps in our understanding of HS that hinder better treatments. With HS driven by complex, poorly understood immune pathways, there remains a clear need for more targeted, effective therapies that can meaningfully change the course of this debilitating disease. Recent research has identified excessive NET formation as a key culprit in HS inflammation, making it a clear target for addressing the disease.
5. How do you think Citryll’s work could impact the future treatment landscape for HS?
Citryll’s work offers a novel approach for the treatment of HS by targeting NETs. Our recently published research demonstrated elevated NET markers in HS lesions and blood, linking them to worse disease severity, suggesting that NETs are fuelling the chronic inflammation in HS – and importantly, providing a fresh therapeutic target.
Neutralising NETs could defuse a key inflammatory trigger that current treatments miss. CIT-013, our lead investigational antibody, is designed to neutralise NETs, by clearing existing inflammatory NET structures and preventing new ones from forming, tackling a root cause of inflammation in HS and offering new hope to HS patients who have had few effective treatments up to date.